Genre: Contained Thriller
Premise: After being kidnapped by a psychotic music producer, a guitarist and her drummer boyfriend are forced to record an album in chains while they try to escape his studio prison.
Why You Should Read: We were shooting for Misery meets Green Room. Would love to see what the people here at SS think. It’s a quick read too at 85 pages.
Writers: Edward Shine & Frankie Shine
Details: 85 pages

There are going to be a lot of Contained Thrillers submitted to The Last Great Screenwriting Contest. That means today’s script will act as a litmus test for the challenges this genre poses. Breaking this script down and seeing what worked and didn’t work should help those submitting. Let’s take a look.

26 year olds James and Prudence aren’t just in a relationship. They’re in a band. When someone paid them to tour in college, the two dropped out – that’s their band name, “The Dropouts,” – and have spent the last five years driving from crappy gig to crappy gig. James is over it. He wants to get a real job and start a real life. Prudence, however, holds onto hope that their big break is around the corner.

The two are finishing up a gig when a man, Phil, approaches them, tazes them, then drives them to his remote home in the woods where he’s created his own little music studio for them to record in. His goal? To have The Dropouts record their first ever album.

At first James and Prudence try to escape. But Phil lets them know that if they try that again, he’ll kill them. Let’s be creative, Phil says. Figure out what this album is going to be. After brainstorming, they begin the recording sessions, with James and Prudence chained down while playing and Phil in the mixing room.

Whenever Phil is gone, the two begin digging out an escape Andy Dufresne style. Then Phil will come back and it’s back to recording. At first, Prudence hates this place. But then she starts to think, hey, maybe this could be good. Make an album. Use the publicity of how it was recorded to become big stars. Finally, they’re going to make it! James thinks she’s crazy though and escapes, leaving Prudence to finish on her own. Will she? Or will she finally wise up and get the heck out of here?

Here’s the worst thing that can happen with a script. Someone tells you the concept, you get an idea in your head of how that movie is going to play out, you then read the script, and it plays out EXACTLY how you thought it would. You never want that to happen as a writer. And that’s how The Album played out for me.

The reason I chose this logline was because it was different from all the other contained thriller submissions. However, when I read it, I did wonder, “Is this going to be two people in a room with a weird man occasionally bothering them and they try to escape every once in a while?” I was scared that those were the only things that were going to happen. And those turned out to be the only things that happened. There wasn’t a single moment in this script that surprised me. You can’t have that happen.

This is why I’m always telling writers you need to occasionally jump into the reader’s mind and ask if what you’re writing in this moment is what they’re expecting. And if it is, come up with something different.

But The Album commits another faux pas. It doesn’t elevate the tension in any of its scenes. Every scene feels the same. The bad guy comes in. We feel some resentment from the protagonists. They talk about something. Then they leave. Meanwhile, whenever Phil leaves, one of them will keep working on their escape route.

When I read the big spec sale script, Shut In, I was genuinely surprised when the main character nailed the druggie’s hand to the floor, trapping him there for the rest of the movie. You could’ve given me 50 tries and I wouldn’t have guessed that the writer would come up with that plot development.

And you get extra points if these interesting developments happen at key moments in the script because they’ll have a lasting impact in the story. By nailing the druggie to the floor, the druggie is now outside the door with our hero the rest of the movie, which gives you potentially fun conversations to write.

The closest this script gets to taking a chance is when Prudence wants to record the album. She thinks the publicity of how they made it will lead to their big break. And while I liked this development in theory, in practice it felt empty, like something that was said but not really explored. For example, a few scenes later, I wasn’t even clear on if Prudence still felt that way.

The script also skimps over its emotional backbone. What this really should’ve been about was James and Prudence’s broken relationship. They’ve been ignoring it for years now, going through the motions, their band the only thing that’s kept them together. Now they’re stuck in this room and it turns out the biggest nightmare isn’t the man keeping them here. It’s that they’re finally forced to face the end of their relationship.

If the writers could’ve nailed that aspect of the story, the contained thriller part wouldn’t have needed to be that good.

As it stands, none of the characters are strong. I took a break at page 60 and when I came back, I thought to myself, “I don’t know any of these characters.” I know Phil is weird and a bad guy. I know Prudence likes the band. I know James is through with the band. But that’s all I know. And we’re talking about a movie with only three characters. How can the reader not know who any of them are?

One of advantages of writing contained thrillers is that there’s lots of dialogue and therefore lots of opportunity to delve into the characters. In Shut In, I know our heroine used to a be a huge drug addict. I know she’s got two kids she can barely take care of. I know she’s been staying at her aunt’s place to get back on her feet. I know she has a weird history with her husband. I genuinely had a feel for who this person was. But in The Album, the characters only exist to serve the plot – to serve this constructed scenario of being forced to make an album.

The biggest sin this script committed, however, was that it never pumped up the volume. It never made a truly daring choice. Maybe James’ fate was a surprise – but it was too little too late. Up until that moment, I never once feared Phil. There’s a reason they had Annie Wilkes take a hammer to Paul Sheldon’s feet. It was to show that she was capable of doing awful things so that we feared her.

But yes, one of the frustrating things about this script was that the writers never pushed the envelope.

And I’m going to guess that part of that was because the script was written specifically for Contained Thriller Showdown. If that’s the case, these criticisms aren’t as damning. It means this is a first draft. So I’d say, you’ve now got your framework for the story. Figure out who your characters are and come up with three or four truly surprising plot developments that keep the story a) fresh and b) intense.

Cause that’s one of the things that was truly frustrating about this read. It never got intense. Which is unfathomable when you look at the concept. Hopefully these notes help the Shine Siblings. Good luck!

Script link: The Album

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Contained Thrillers are highly dependent on scene variety! – One of the biggest challenges in contained thrillers is the scenes feeling too much alike. The Album suffered from this big time. The scenes cycled between three types. Recording music. Phil kind of mad and threatening the protagonists. And private discussions between Prudence and James about escaping. Predictability is death in a screenplay. Once we’ve figured out your bag of tricks, we no longer want to be at the show. So you’ve got to mix in a bunch of different scene types. Take Shut In. I’ve got to escape this room. I’ve got to explain to my 4 year old child how to get me a tool that will help me in my escape. I’ve got to psychologically trick this pedophile drug addict so he stays away from my kids. I have to figure out how to keep my kids from freezing now that the drug addict has left the front door open. I have to reason with my addict husband to come to his senses. I have to figure out how to feed my infant without any food. There were enough situations to cycle through that they never got repetitive. The Album needed that.

I want to keep giving you inspiration and advice for The Last Great Screenwriting Contest. So here are ten things I commonly see when I’m reading a good script.

1) An unobtrusive writing style – Too many screenwriters want you to know that they’re a WRITER. They want to describe everything beautifully. They want every scene to be dense and self-important, all the things that prove how serious and strong of a writer one is. I can tell you from experience that these tend to be the hardest reads. They take a lot longer. They’re not fun to read. Good writers understand the burden of the reader and try and make the script as easy to read as possible. Sparse prose. Never adding more than is necessary. Keeping the story moving. These are the fun scripts to read. Now there will always be a difference between a script like Buried and a script like Gladiator. Gladiator obviously requires more description. Still, you always want to keep the reader in mind. When was the last time you finished reading an entire script? I’m guessing except for a couple of dozen of you, it’s been a while. Why didn’t you finish it? Because at a certain point it became more ‘work’ to get through the script than ‘fun.’ Don’t make the same mistake on your script.

2) A first scene that creates a sense of mystery – If you took everything I’ve ever written on this site about the importance of your first scene, it would probably be as long as Lord of the Rings. And yet, day in and day out, I continue to read screenplays with bad first scenes. So the message isn’t getting through. What I’ve noticed is that I often get pulled into scripts where the first scene creates a sense of mystery. There’s some question that’s been posed and I need to keep reading to find out the answer. For example, one of my favorite recent scripts is The Traveler. In that script, we start off with a man driving, and then slowly, bit by bit, his car begins to disappear, until it’s gone and he’s floating through the air all by himself, still in the driving position, then he tumbles to the ground and rolls to a stop. When I read a scene like that, I want to know what’s going on. And that gets me to keep reading.

3) Conflict in dialogue – One of the quickest ways for me to dismiss a script is when I read really on-the-nose dry dialogue. Dialogue that doesn’t have any sense of spark. The characters are speaking more to establish themselves or push the plot along than they are actually having a conversation. One of the easiest ways to up your dialogue game is to inject conflict into every dialogue scene. It doesn’t have to be over-the-top conflict. But something that forces the characters to work something out. There’s an imbalance in the moment and the only way that it’s going to re-balance is if the characters hash it out. In The Menu, one of my favorite scripts from last year, we start with two people on a mysterious date (yup, we get another first scene with a sense of mystery!). He’s freaking out because, wherever it is they’re going, it’s important to him. His date, meanwhile, is trying to relax him. And the more she tries to relax him, the more revved up he gets. Note how this isn’t some huge dramatic argument. That’s not what we’re looking for in every dialogue scene. But there’s an imbalance here that the characters are working out. There’s conflict to play with.

4) An organic conflict within your hero – Characters are always more interesting when they’re fighting an inner battle. If everything is neat and clean inside your hero, why would we be interested in them? The great thing about inner conflict is it can literally be about anything. But a trick to find it is to ask yourself, “What is the first thing my character wakes up in the morning anxious about?” That should lead you to your inner conflict. We can go as far back as Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. The second we meet him, he’s graduated college and HE HAS NO IDEA WHAT HE WANTS TO DO WITH HIS LIFE. That’s the conflict that eats at him every day. More recently, we have Arthur from Joker. He’s trying to figure out how to connect with the world yet he has no idea how. Every day he wakes up trying to figure out that equation. Obviously, the conflicts will be lighter in lighter genres, like comedies. But a quick way to make characters stand out is to give them an interesting inner conflict.

5) A good scene writer – Recently I read a script where the first 30 pages consisted of scenes that were barely a page long. The script moved quickly but the pacing was odd. We were always moving on before anything got going. Conversely, I read another script where all of the scenes were 8-10 pages. Shockingly, they were just as incomplete, as the characters were always prattling on without a point. I know I’m reading a good writer when one of the first few scenes in the script is its own complete compelling thing. It’s got a point (characters with a goal). It has a beginning – a setup to the scene that lets us know what it’s about. It has a middle – conflict between characters and obstacles that come up. And it has an end – the scene’s own little climax. These writers understand that scenes are like mini-movies which need to entertain the readers in and unto themselves. If every scene is an entertaining little movie then it’s impossible for the reader to get bored.

6) A sense of purpose – Good writers know that every scene is a piece of the puzzle and, therefore, must be pushing towards the puzzle’s completion. There is a noticeable focus to each scene that indicates the writer knows exactly where he or she is taking you. On the flip side, you have writers who think scripts are places to figure their story out. They might get an idea on page 20 and let that dictate where the story goes next. When you write this way, 99 times out of 100, your script will lack focus. It will read like you’re not sure what story you’re telling but, hopefully, along the way, you’ll figure it out. When you hear that a script displays confidence, it is always in reference to writers who have a deft command of their story and it’s clear, every step of the way, they know where they’re taking you. By the way, it’s perfectly okay to seek out tangents in early drafts. But not at all okay to do it in your final draft.

7) A steady stream of unexpected choices – This is something I harp on all the time on the site. But it truly is one of the easiest ways for me to tell if a script is going to be good or not. If a plot development or scene or character in the story comes up and the writer chooses to write something that 95 out of 100 writers would’ve written, I know I’m in for a long read. Good writers get into the heads of the reader, ask what they expect to happen at this moment, and then make sure not to write that. Honestly, this starts at the concept stage. If you give me an idea that I’ve seen hundreds of times before, I can promise the script will be bad within 99.9% certainty. One of the biggest level-ups for a screenwriter – and it’s something most of them don’t figure out until between their 7th and 10th script – is when they start actively seeking out unexpected choices in their screenplays. I mean, did anyone see the hidden room in Parasite coming? Did anyone see that crazy climax in the backyard coming? This is the creative bar you need to hold yourself to. Cause like I tell everyone, if you’re just going to give us what everyone else does, why do we need you? We can just go to everyone else.

8) Understanding the power of time – One of the biggest decisions you will make in a script is deciding how long the story’s timeline will be. The reason this decision is so important is because time has the biggest effect on your structure. Once you know how long your story is, you can begin to figure out how everything is going to play out. Generally speaking, the shorter the time frame, the easier it is to structure. Not long ago, I reviewed a script called 9 Days. The concept was as close as you’re going to get to experimental without being experimental. It was about a guy in some nether-not-quite-heaven reality who decides which people get to live a life down on earth. That concept could’ve been dealt with in a very messy way. Believe me, I’ve seen it before. However, the simple decision of giving our hero a 9 day deadline gave the story a firm structure. Another example is Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. That movie followed a dozen different characters and was about the chaos of junior high and high school in a small Midwestern town. It would’ve been so easy to get lost in that world. Yet Linklater had everything take place in one day. A messy story all of a sudden became very focused.

9) A love of the second act – The second act is where most beginner and intermediate scripts go to die. It’s the biggest most expansive space in the script (50-60 pages!) and if you don’t understand how it works or have a plan to tackle it, your script will fall into this abyss as well. One of the things you learn the longer you travel this screenwriting journey, is that the second act IS YOUR MOVIE. It’s not some thing to muddle your way through until you get to the climax. It’s the place where your characters will be challenged by the things they fear the most, which will include the external journey, the other characters they interact with, and, like we discussed before, themselves. In other words, this is where your characters are going to figure themselves out. Once you embrace your second act as an opportunity to explore that, you will begin to love it.

10) A killer ending – I read a lot of scripts where you can see the writer getting tired the deeper into the script we go and so the ending feels more like something they were just happy to get to than the single biggest most memorable sequence in the film, which is what an ending should be. Remember, the ending IS WHAT WE THE READER LEAVE WITH. If you write a great ending, a reader will have this compulsion to go out and tell someone about it. They can’t keep it in because it’s the last strong memory they’ve been given. As crazy as it sounds, lots of writers take their ending for granted. They think as long as the good guy saves his girlfriend from the bad guy that we’re going to give them a big fat gold sticker. It doesn’t work like that. Outside of your opening scene, your climax should be the scene you put the most time into. And that’s not just writing. You should be thinking through 10, 20, 30 different potential climaxes to make sure you’re giving us the best one.

P.S. If you’re still deciding what script to write for The Last Screenwriting Contest, consider a logline consultation ($25). Not only will I analyze your concept’s strengths and weaknesses and write a new version of the logline for you, but I also give a 1-10 rating on the concept. As I’ve noted here before, I don’t encourage anyone to write a script for a logline that gets under a 7 out of 10. So it’s an indirect way to find out if your concept would fare well in the contest. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if interested.

Genre: High School/Comedy/Romance
Premise: To revamp her self image, an arrogant but well-meaning high school socialite decides to help a former friend land the guy of her dreams… but in the process, realizes she wants her for herself.
About: This script finished Top 10 on the 2019 Black List. The writer, Sara Monge, wrote for the 2013 show, 101 Ways to Get Rejected.
Writer: Sara Monge
Details: 103 pages

I can appreciate a good high school flick.

Back in the day, the high school comedy was a staple on every studio’s film slate. But let’s be real. Nobody could ever live up to the John Hughes flicks. His films had that magical je ne sais quoi that all high school movies have since been striving to find. Even the vaunted “Easy A,” a script that everyone in Hollywood said was the best high school script they’d read in decades, landed in theaters with a big “meh.”

When a genre is this stale, the only thing you can do to revive it is reinvent it. Anything short of that will get you some polite “attaboys,” but that’s as far as the compliments go. Does “Glendale” reinvent the high school spec? It tries to. And, to some, it may have succeeded. But as much as I was rooting for this script, it never quite took off. Let’s take a look.

Six years ago. Flashback. 12 year old best friends Kate (beautiful and perfect) and Christine (awkward and unconventionally pretty) are playing that 7th grade game you both love and dread – Spin the Bottle. Kate is trying to pump Christine up for a rigged kiss with Ken doll perfect, Devon.

But while they’re getting ready, Christine inadvertently admits to Kate that she masturbates non-stop. This being 7th grade, Kate tells a couple of people, and all of a sudden Christine is the junior high leper. Everyone thinks she’s a perverted weirdo. This Scarlett letter follows her for six years, where we re-meet Christine and Kate, who no longer talk to one another.

Kate has always felt guilty about what she did so she decides to invite Christine to one of her big parties as a way to make amends before they go off into life and never talk again. Incidentally, the next day, when Christine is driving to school, she’s watching the beautiful Devon walk by (yes, the same guy from Spin the Bottle) and accidentally crashes into the side of Kate’s car.

The two are rushed to the school nurse and forced to talk to one another. Kate says she knows Christine likes Devon and she’s willing to help her get him. Christine calls her out, saying she’s only doing this cause she feels guilty, which Kate cops to. But she allows Kate’s help anyway, and soon she’s dressing better, make-upping better, and her IG game is on point. It starts to work. Devon starts liking her pictures! OMG.

However, the more Kate and Christine hang out, the more they rekindle their friendship. The more they rekindle their friendship, the more they realize this might be more than friendship. Yes, that’s right. Kate and Christine are into each other. In fact, THEY’VE ALWAYS BEEN INTO EACH OTHER. Christine is so down but for Kate, she has to think about her image. She isn’t sure that “gay” fits into it. Will Kate break Christine’s heart once again? Or will these two find love in the likeliest of unlikely places?

One thing I have to remind myself is that not everything can be a Carson movie. We can’t only have sci-fi, time travel, and contained thrillers, as much as I would love that to be a reality. You need variety in the movie market or else everything is the same. So, yes, I’d love an occasional great high school movie.

But Glendale is the Jamaican bobsledding team of screenplays. You really want them to do well but they just can’t keep up with the big countries.

For example, one of the differences between high-grade professional screenplays and younger writers is strong plot beats. When you need something to happen in your story, you don’t come up with a lazy way to do it. You think it through and you come up the best plot beat possible.

Christine crashing into Kate while watching Devon walk as a means to get the two talking again felt extremely over-the-top. You couldn’t just… have them start talking again? You don’t need some big silly plot thing to happen. And you may argue, “This is a movie and you do things more dramatically in movies.” That’s true in some cases but you have to choose your battles. With something as simple as talking, you could’ve had them both waiting for a ride outside the front of the school at the same time and that lead to a conversation.

Then there was the love story between Christine and Kate. Sometimes I believed it and sometimes I didn’t.

Love stories are trickier than you think because there are two worlds involved. There is the character world where the two characters are unaware they’re in a movie. This is the world you want to be in as a writer. You want your characters saying and doing things only because they want to say and do them.

Then there’s the writer world where the characters are waiting for the writer to write their next line. Or to give them their next action. This is the world you don’t want to be in. Because when you start making the characters do things, IT READS LIKE SOMEONE IS MAKING THEM DO THINGS.

And that was my issue with their story. Sometimes their interactions felt natural. Other times it was obvious the writer was making things happen. For example, everything here is framed around Kate helping Christine attract Devon. But Christine is gay. She’s not into dudes. So why is she going after this guy? Because it’s a way for the writer to get her and Kate around each other.

I realize that when you’re writing a movie, you must move the plot along. You can’t pretend like it doesn’t exist. But that’s the ultimate goal of a screenwriter, is being able to move your plot invisibly so that it looks like things are happening and not that someone is making them happen. That’s the holy grail.

So when writing a dialogue scene, don’t try to make the characters say what you want them to say. SEE WHAT THEY SAY FIRST. Observe them speaking as an objective party. If they go off-book, let them go-off book. Then you can reel them in when you rewrite the scene. I’ve always found that better than trying to control the scene from the outset. That’s when you get scenes that feel forced.

To be honest, there wasn’t anything bad in this script. It was a light easy read. It was just little things here and there that kept reminding me I was reading a script. Like how the movie is built around, “Are Kate and Christine going to kiss or not?” It was a sweet way to frame the story. But then they finally do and the last 25 pages they’re having hardcore sex. It’s like…okay, so much for the sweetness. It just felt uneven, like it never quite knew what tone it was trying to achieve.

Then again, I’m not the demo for this script! And it’s harder to write these high school scripts than it looks. Taste will vary. Unfortunately, even with some of the good stuff I read, this one wasn’t for me.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Look, material like this can get you a Netflix green light. But I still contend that if you want to write the next THEATRICAL high school movie, you need to reinvent the genre. That’s what John Hughes did with The Breakfast Club. Nobody had ever seen a high school movie that took place in one day with a handful of characters, that relied almost completely on dialogue. You have to be that forward-thinking today. Whatever you’re used to seeing in “high school movies,” don’t write that. Come up with something different. It’s actually a genre that’s primed to reinvent because it’s been stale for so long. So if you’ve got that idea, enter it into The Last Great Screenwriting Contest! :)

Genre: Comedy
Premise: Actor Nicolas Cage, spiraling and trapped in debt, makes an appearance at the birthday party of a Mexican billionaire. While there, he learns that the billionaire runs a drug cartel, and the CIA recruits Cage for intelligence.
About: Not only did this script finish Top 6 in the 2019 Black List, but it got Cage onboard! The movie will be made by Lionsgate. The writers created the TV series, Ghosted, which was a comedic take on The X-Files.
Writers: Kevin Etten & Tom Gormican
Details: 117 pages (but pretty much all dialogue so it reads fast)

I’ve always marveled at these famous actors who did great GREAT movies now doing a dozen sixth rate micro-indies a year. Take Bruce Willis, for example. Bruce Willis has all the money in the world. Maybe more than all of it. Yet he makes these awful 2 million dollar B-movies that nobody sees. It doesn’t make sense.

But you know what does make sense? Nicholas Cage doing a dozen sixth rate micro indies a year. Cage was a notoriously wild spender at his peak and supposedly had some big issues with the IRS at one point. You get the sense that Cage isn’t doing these movies for fun. At least not all of them. He’s doing them to pay off all the debt he’s accrued.

And the unfortunate thing about Hollywood is that when big stars start chasing these low-level movies to pay the bills, they start becoming associated with low-level movies. And it’s very hard to dig your way out from that. I don’t think any former star has dug themselves a deeper hole than Nicholas Cage.

Of course, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Cage really does love making these movies. He’s just one of those actors that always needs to be on a set. I get the feeling this script is going to shed some light on this aspect of the eccentric actor’s career. Let’s take a look.

Nicholas Cage is having dinner with Quentin Tarantino, who’s really close to giving him the starring role in his latest film. But then word comes back from Cage’s agent. Tarantino is going with someone else. Devastated and broke, Cage doubts when his next big chance is going to come, so much so that he considers QUITTING ACTING.

But then his agent calls. There’s a Nicholas Cage superfan in Mexico who’s willing to pay Cage 1 million dollars to come to his birthday party. Cage hems and haws before ultimately going and is surprised when the 45 year old man who invited him, Javi, is a cool dude. In actuality, Javi is a closet screenwriter and he’s hoping to get Cage to read his stuff.

But then Cage is approached by a mysterious man who tells him he’s working for the United States government and that Javi is responsible for 30 billion dollars worth of drug trade and that he’s killed thousands of people. They need Cage to do his best acting job yet – convince Javi that he’s interested in his screenplay, work on it together, and, in the meantime, gather intel on Javi.

Cage doesn’t know what’s going on but at this point, he doesn’t really have a choice, so both Cage and Javi start putting a script together, with both of them in starring roles. Funnily enough, Cage starts to like the script and feels like it might be his best character piece yet. So they keep working on it but run into the same problem all screenwriters run into. They don’t have an ending!

Cage’s CIA connection tells Cage to use the screenwriting suggestion of having Cage’s character’s family kidnapped in order to figure out where Javi is hiding his latest kidnapped subject. But Javi gets so into the idea of bringing a family relationship into the plot that, unbeknownst to Nick, he flies Nick’s ex-wife and daughter down to Mexico for inspiration. Of course, not long after, Javi realizes Nick is working for the government, and therefore really does kidnap Nick’s ex-wife and daughter. Nick finds himself REALLY IN one of his movies. Does he have what it takes to get out alive? We’ll find out.

I came into this one skeptical.

Nicholas Cage is one of those actors who’s been made fun of so much by this point that he may have passed his sell by date. And that’s the vibe I was getting early on in the script. Cage would have these conversations with his younger cooler self about Cage’s plummeting career and Young Cage keeps pushing him to get back on top. The scenes were okay and will definitely play better onscreen than on the page. But they felt predictable. You guys know me. Whenever I read choices that feel like a lot of different writers could’ve come up with the same thing, I lose faith in the writer.

But then the invitation to Mexico shows up (our inciting incident). Going into this, I had not read the logline so I didn’t know that was coming. I thought I was going to get some boring “Nicholas Cage tries to get back on top in Hollywood” plot. It shows you the power of a hook. You’re immediately thinking – some weirdo inviting a struggling movie star to his birthday in another country – there’s a lot of comedy to mine from that. So that kept me reading.

Then Gormican and Etten surprise me again when it turns out Javi is a normal guy. Actually, we get some scenes of Javi talking to his business partners away from Nic Cage that paint him as this normal everyday person. So I’m thinking to myself – hmmmm, he’s not going to be some weirdo freak? Where is this going? I’m intrigued.

Then they hit us with the second big hook, which is that Javi is a drug kingpin. I feel a little stupid that I didn’t see that coming but, again, I hadn’t read the logline and the writers did a good job making him look like a normal guy. I thought maybe he’d brought Cage here to convince him to be in his movie. This new plot point, however, was much juicier. Now we’re putting Cage in a bunch of dramatic irony scenes – we know he’s trying to incriminate Javi but Javi doesn’t.

But probably the best thing about this script is that it’s about a broken family. Pretty much the entire first act sets up Cage’s problems with his ex-wife and his 16 year old daughter. It’s rare that writers do this these days. Most people think there’s no need to “waste” pages on character development in the first act of a comedy or an action film because people go to those movies to laugh and see things get blown up.

But it’s a smart move because it pays dividends in the third act. I still contend a big reason Taken worked was because its entire first act was character development. People don’t care about a daughter being taken from your hero when you’ve only known her for two minutes. They needed to be around that relationship between the father and the daughter to care about it. Same thing here.

And it wasn’t just that. The writers did this really cleverly. Javi had kidnapped a big rival’s daughter. The CIA wanted to know where he was hiding her. So they told Cage to add a kidnapping plot to the script Cage and Javi were working on and then innocently ask Javi, “Where would we keep the daughter character if the bad guy kidnapped her?” This then led to Javi flying the ex-wife and daughter in for inspiration, and now you have a way to really kidnap these two without it seeming forced.

That’s the problem with every script where the bad guy kidnaps the girl in distress. It’s added in a blunt and cliche manner. This script, however, used its unique setup to bring them in organically. For me, that’s what made this script more than a garden variety “worth the read.” It’s a fun script but it’s also cleverly plotted. Props to the writing team!

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: One of the best places to find comedy ideas is “Ripped from the headlines” articles that aren’t comedic. This concept was clearly inspired by the Sean Penn – El Chapo incident. The writers then asked, “What actor could we put in Penn’s role that would make it hilarious?” And they wisely came up with Nicholas Cage.

I have one question for you before I get to today’s article. Is the key to getting an original script turned into a wide release movie one single shot? I know it’s a small sample size but after 1917 made a shocking 36 million this weekend (when was the last time a World War 1 movie made 36 million in a weekend???), we have to ask the question. Cause there was that OTHER original idea – a little movie called Gravity – that was a single-shot film (for the most part) and that became a surprise hit also. Coincidence?

I’m asking the question half-jokingly but it’s an intriguing discussion. It’s so hard to get any original movie released these days. So if you can find any trend out there, you run with it. Now both these movies were writer directors. But I think a spec writer could do an even better job because they wouldn’t be worried about pulling off certain shots and whether something would be too difficult or not. They could write whatever came to mind.

Why does the single shot movie work? Well, obviously, it’s hard to pull off so it’s easy to build buzz around a one-shot movie. But from a screenwriting perspective, if you’re doing something in one shot, you have to create a sense of urgency or else there’ll be a bunch of slow spots in the movie. So, in a way, it forces you to create a really tight exciting story. Might we now get a few single-shot spec scripts in The Last Great Screenwriting Contest? Maybe a single shot social horror thriller even? We’ll see!

Moving on, I’m going to talk about producing today because that’s where my mind is at. This past week, I stumbled onto a movie called “Sweetheart” on Netflix. The film is about a shipwrecked girl who wakes up on an island only to learn that a monster lives on it as well. The movie follows her journey both trying to survive on an island and trying not to get killed by this monster.

The main reason I watched this movie is because it’s a movie I would’ve made. You’ve got a contained thriller. You’ve got a supernatural threat. That combination has been responsible for a lot of movies that have made a lot of money. You’ve also got a hot young director coming off a hit movie at Sundance. I would’ve seen all these elements and thought, “Slam dunk.”

Unfortunately, as I hit the 30 minute mark of the movie, I was struggling to stay invested. I kept asking myself, “Why? This is a movie you would make. Why isn’t it working!?” As if being able to answer the question would ensure that every future movie I made wouldn’t suffer the same fate. Gradually, after I was able to take my emotion out of it, I realized it came back to script problems. More specifically, it reminded me that contained thrillers are incredibly hard to pull off. And Sweetheart shows you why.

When we come with a contained idea, the first thing we think about is the cool moments. For example, in the big spec contained thriller, “Shut In,” you would think of the moment where the main character nailed the bad guy’s hand into the floor to keep him there. Or, with this movie, you might imagine the first time our heroine sees the monster. These moments are the moments that get us excited to write a script.

Here’s the problem though. There are only about four of five of these big exciting moments in your head when you’re putting an idea together. In the best case scenario, these moments take up fifteen minutes of screen time. In addition to this, you’re likely going to have a big climax, so we can add another 10-15 minutes of screen time on top of that. This means you have 30 minutes figured out. Which means you still have 70 MORE MINUTES TO FILL.

Now filling up 70 minutes in a Star Wars or James Bond movie isn’t that difficult. You just go to a new planet or a new country and throw in a car chase. But 70 minutes in a CONTAINED THRILLER??? Even screenwriting aces have trouble making those minutes interesting. Usually, all you have is a few characters and a small space. What do you do with 70 minutes of that?

That’s clearly where Sweetheart fell apart. It didn’t have a plan for those 70 minutes. It made the fatal mistake of assuming the concept alone was going to do the work for it. That we’d be so excited in the moments between the monster attacks to see it again that we’d wait through anything. Watching a character washed up on an island try to survive on page 10 is interesting. Not so much on page 60, when we’re bored of it.

It’s the writer’s job, then, to come up with plot beats that keep the story moving. And, to their credit, they try. For example, a couple of other shipwrecked characters (from her ship) show up about 50 minutes in. And that, at least, gives us some new scenarios, like characters being able to have a conversation. However, the plot beats were lazy. In fact, there’s another girl washed up on a deserted island with a monster spec that was written at the same time as Sweetheart. What happens at the 50 page mark of that script? A couple of shipwrecked characters show up. In other words, your story choice was so predictable that the only other person writing this idea came up with the same plot beat.

It is IMPERATIVE as a screenwriter to always check yourself on these things. When you come up with a plot development, one of the first things you should ask yourself is, “Would someone else come up with this as well?” And if the answer is yes, don’t write it. Come up with something else. The counter-argument to this is, “Well how many plot options are there in this scenario? Bringing in new characters is one of the only things you can do.” There’s never a situation where there’s only one thing to do. There are always options. It’s definitely harder to come up with the options that nobody’s thought of yet. But those are the ones that are going to make your script great.

Another issue was that there was no sense of danger in a script about a woman stuck on an island with a monster. She and the monster routinely see each other and nothing happens. She’s easily able to hide under a log or behind a tree. It gets to the point where you’re wondering if the monster is even interested in killing her. If the only person in your thriller script isn’t in danger, you don’t have a thriller.

In retrospect, I think I know why they did this. If the monster is too aggressive and powerful, the movie’s over in five minutes. The only way to make the movie last was to make him passive. But then where’s the movie? The last time I checked, the alien in “Alien” doesn’t occasionally walk by the characters, uninterested in them. It aggressively hunts them down one by one. And I’m not bashing Sweetheart for not living up to the greatest sci-fi horror film ever. I get that these are tough script problems to figure out. But if the audience isn’t feeling fear for your hero, we don’t have anything to work with.

I bring this up in the hopes that those of you writing contained thrillers for The Last Great Screenwriting Contest approach these dangerous 70 minutes strategically. You might want to watch Sweetheart and read Shut In back-to-back. In Shut In, we have two children in danger outside the room our hero is stuck in the entire movie. That alone adds a sense of urgency and tension that Sweetheart never had. It ensured that we were always rooting for our hero to escape the room so she could rescue her kids.

And that’s probably the best lesson to learn for a contained thriller – personal character-driven stories give you the best chance at surviving those big gaps of screen time where you don’t have a set-piece. I’m still on the edge of my seat for the Shut In heroine when all the noise died down because I still want her to save her kids. I’m not scared for the Sweetheart heroine at all because, from what I can tell, this monster isn’t interested in killing her.

Did you guys see Sweetheart? If so, what did you think?